The Helen Foresman Spencer Museum of Art, The University of Kansas, The Dorothy and Herbert Vogel Collection: Fifty Works for Fifty States, a joint initiative of the Trustees of the Dorothy and Herbert Vogel Collection and the National Gallery of Art, with generous support of the National Endowment for the Arts and the Institute of Museum and Library Services

Exhibition Label:"Empire of Things", 20-Dec-2012Peter Hutchinson often creates small-scale models of fantastic landscapes with odd materials. He shapes this landscape with scorched rocks and puts bread mold inside glass tubes. Together they create a landscape in which life and non-life coexist.

Exhibition Label:"NetWorks: Art and Artists from the Dorothy and Herbert Vogel Collection," Mar-2011, Susan Earle, Stephen Goddard, and SMA InternsPeter Hutchinson’s first mold-art pieces, including the work exhibited here, were small-scale models for fantastical landscape projects. As Hutchinson explains, “About this time I was making maquettes of landscapes that, while purporting to be of earthly places, were more truly science fiction, with tubes containing chemical crystals that might exist in oxygenfree environments or airless planetarybodies. They were juxtaposed with tubescontaining early life forms such as mold, bacteria, and algae. This represented the contrast between life and non-life, between lively earth and lifeless space.”

An avid gardener, Hutchinson’s conceptual art is also rooted in ecological pragmatism. In simple terms, he writes that his work llustrates “the reuse of decayed matter and recycling it for use by plants - a fact well understood by those with compost heaps.”